The early morning of June 11th (or June 10 evening for the folks in US west coast) saw wordpress.com going down! This is the first time that I remember such a big outage ever since I started with wordpress. It was just giving an error message saying "Wordpress will be back shortly!". Millions of blogs hosted on wordpress were affected because of this. Also non-wordpress hosted blogs using wordpress were affected for their stats. As the stats plugin uses API keys issued by wordpress.
[caption id="attachment_141" align="alignleft" width="779" caption="Wordpress.com goes down, affects wordpress stats as well."][/caption]

Majority of wordpress blogs are up now and rest are slowly crawling back to normalcy. The main site is yet to be restored.

I went for a Scuba diving trip at Netrani Island, 10 nautical miles off the western coast of India from the city of Murudeshwar, KN. It was a weekend trip. The trip was organised by Bangalore Mountaineering Club BMC. We started at 10 from bangalore and reached Murudeshwar by 9 next morning. In between we stopped at Jog falls which was mostly reduced to a stream. There were 8 of us including the event co-ordinator. 2 more folks joined us later in Murudeshwar itself. We landed up at the RNS Highway , a good hotel 5 minutes drive from the beach. The charge is about Rs.450 for a non-AC double room whereas it is INR 1250 for an AC double room. After some initial freshening up and a light breakfast, we went for a training session in a pool. We spent some 3 hours in the pool learning various tips and related hand signals about scuba diving. After that we had a good lunch at an eatery called Park Groves nearby. Then we retired back to the hotel. We left for the beach in the evening. We visited the Shiva temple at the beach that boasts of the tallest shiva statue in the world. Its 123 feet or 37mts high. We also went atop the nearby 20 story Gopura, another tallest in world. The lift takes you upto 18 story. After that we spent some time off at the beach, had a good dinner at Kamath and then went back to hotel and hit the bed.

Next day we were up and on the beach by 8 am. After a light breakfast, we boarded the boat to Netrani Islands. There were two boats, one with us and the other with the scuba gear. We reached the island in around one hours time. There after we raced to go in for scuba diving followed by snorkelling in the calm waters. When you are in the deep sea, then only you really understand the meaning of a real deep blue sea!
The snorkelling and scuba diving were my first experience. Its simply awesome and amazing.

We started back for land around 3 and were back on dry grounds by 4.30. Thereafter we went back to hotel, freshened up and hit the road again after light snacks, We had dinner in the evening the city of sagar and we reached Bangalore by 7 early next morning!

Many thanks for your response to my message, I appreciate your kind gesture to find time to give reponse to my message to you. First and foremost and brief self introduction,I am Jannifer Jean Kekouri,24years old and the only daughter of my late parents Mr.and Mrs. Jean Kekouri.

My father was a highly reputable busnness magnate-(a cocoa merchant)who operated in the capital of Ivory Coast during his days It is sad to say that he passed away mysteriously in France during one of his business trips abroad year 12th.Feb. 2003.Though his sudden death was linked or rather suspected to have been masterminded by an uncle of his who travelled with him at that time.But God knows the truth!

My mother died when I was just 4 years old,and since then my father took me so special. Before his death on Febuary 12- 2007 he called me and disclose to me that he had a sum of $4.5 million US DOLLARS (Four Million Five hundred thousand USD) deposited with one of the local banks here in Ivory Coast.

He also said he used my name as his next of kin to the fund with the bank as his only daughter, as well as the next of kin. He also explained to me that it was because of this wealth that he was poisoned by his business assocaites, That I should seek for a foreign partner in a country of my choice where I will transfer this money to and use it for investment purposes. I want you to assist me in clearing this fund into your account overseas as a beneficiary of the fund,and also use it for an investment purpose.

I am just 25 years old and a high school and really don't know what to do.Now I want an account overseas where I can transfer this funds. This is because I have suffered a lot of set backs as a result of incessant political crisis here in Ivory coast.The death of my father actually brought sorrow to my life. Dearest one,I am in a sincere desire of your humble assistance in this regards Your suggestions and ideas will be highly regarded.

Now permit me to ask these few questions:- 1. Can you honestly help me?
2. Can I completely trust you?
3. What percentage of the total amount in question will be good for you after the money is in your account?

Please,Consider this and get back to me as soon as possible, as well I will like you to reply to me with your private email address if you are willing to have the relevant documents to confirm the existence of the fund for verification from the bank and to confirm the authenticity of my proposal to you also for easy communication.

Above all I'm corresponding with you from my country here in Cote D'Ivoire West Africa and moreso there is great political war going on here in my country, that is the main reason why I contacted you to help me in getting me and my only inheritance out of this country so that I may not loosed my life and the inheritance to war in this country, infact I'm facing hard difficulty at the moment in this country,Thank you so much. N.B: SEND YOUR DETAILS TO MY PRIVATE EMAIL ADDRESS: janniferjean@hotmail.fr, jean.jannifer@yahoo.com , janniferjean79@yahoo.com.hk

In the next level of Niagra scam, the scammer no longer talks about any accident or crash or any misfortune that happened. Instead straight forward he goes away telling he is sorry that the last fund transfer attempt failed. You should contact his secretary to try it all out again. lol.

I'm sorry but happy to inform you about my success in getting those funds transferred under the cooperation of a new partner from London though I tried my best to involve you in the business but God decided the whole situations. Presently I’m in London for investment projects with my own share of the total sum. Meanwhile, I didn't forget your past efforts and attempts to assist me in transferring those funds despite that it failed us some how.

Now contact my secretary in Burkina Faso her name is Mrs. Demba Narus on her e-mail address below (demba_nerus2006@w.cn) ask him to send you the total of $4.8m, which I kept for your compensation for all the past efforts and attempts to assist me in this matter. I appreciated all your efforts at that time very much.
So feel free and get in touched with my secretary Mrs. Demba Narus and instruct him where to send the amount to you.

Please do let me know immediately you receive it so that we can share the joy after all the suffer ness at that time. In the moment, I’m very busy here because of the investment projects which I and the new partner are having at hand, finally, remember that I had forwarded instruction to the secretary on your behalf to receive that money, so feel free to get in touch with Mrs. Demba Narus. She will send the amount to you without any delay.

Let me tell you first what all I am going to tell you in this post. I am going to tell you how to export your opera bookmarks and speed dial settings to Google chrome in case chrome is not auto recognising opera as a browser from which you can import settings. And all this in an apple Mac. Am assuming your chrome recognised your installed firefox as a browser from which you can import your bookmarks. So here, for the bookmarks, we are basically going to do Opera -> Firefox -> Chrome.

First and foremost, how to export opera bookmarks in mac to google chrome in mac.

In Opera, Go to File -> Import and Export -> Export Bookmarks as HTML and save the bookmarks.html.

Now open the default profile of your Firefox. For those who are wondering whats the default profile, then most probably thats the only profile you are having. So just open firefox. For those who know what the default profile means, we need to open the default profile because Google chrome can import from only the default profile of Firefox.

Go to Chrome-> Import bookmarks and Settings.
Choose firefox from the popup window.
And if all goes fine, then your opera bookmarks must now be in Chrome :)

Now importing your opera speed-dials into chrome is a hell lot trickier. Ofcourse, chrome provides an easy gui to add customised search engines (Right click in address bar -> edit search engines) The name is a name by which you can remember which search you are using. The keyword is the word that you will use to tell chrome to identify which search to use. Example , if g is your keyword for google.com (and assuming you ve changed your default search engine :P ) then g test query will make chrome use google for searching test query.

Now why on earth would one want to use alternate search engines?
This is easily answered in a corporate world. Where you have your own corp related internal multiple search applications.

The way I did it was (summary, ask in comments if you really wanna know. I am lazy :P )
1) Install speeddial extension in chrome. (Am not sure if its quite essential).
2) Get the speeddial.ini file of opera.
3) Strip out the name, keyword and searchurl. Replace %S with {searchTerms}
4) Create multiple sql queries like

5) Use sqlite plugin of firefox to edit the chrome sqlite file "Web Data" that stores all this info.
Navigate to keywords table in the database. Go to Execute SQL and run your sql query you generated above.
This will add your opera search engines (customised) to chrome!

Just finished reading "The Immortals of Meluha" by the debutant author Amish Tripathi. The Immortals of Meluha is the personification of the great Hindu deity Lord Shiva. The book talks about Lord Shiva, various mythological stories related to him in simple daily talk English, more important English that the present Indian generation can identify with. The story starts with the emergence of Neelkanth, the saviour, the evil defeater. Later on as the story progresses, Shiva meets Sati and further later defeats the evil. But then he is perplexed. Who/what really is evil. The people he has just defeated are they evil? Or has he been tricked into evil by the erstwhile Asuras?
And then he lands up in the land that he has just conquered, Ayodhya, the invincible land, the birth place of Lord Rama.

The last 100 pages of the book compare the two kingdoms - Meluha and Swadeep. Meluha, the land of immortals. The place where people are taken care of by the state. And then Swadeep, where people are left to fend for themselves. However there is a big difference! The Swadeeps live with dignity! Even the beggar on the road has more dignity than the Princess of Meluha could muster while she was ostracized!

The later part of the book looks like a description of modern day India. Infact, the whole book mentions the word "India" only a few times. But somehow the word "India" feels out of place in the context. The story talks about the sapta-sindhu, the citadel of Hariappa (Hariyupa as in book) and Mohenjodaro along with the its great bath. All this reference to history in modern reference brings back somehow nice memories of high school history textbooks.

Also the book seems to be slighty inspired by Ayn Rand - With the initial part talking about state taking care of people (which is completely anti- Ayn Rand btw but pro Ram-Rajya) and then the a capitalist like rule in the actual land of Ram Rajya. One wonders whether the author wants to ask what really is Ram Rajya? The place where every one has all that he needs, all equal amongst themselves but then they deny dignity to the sufferers just to maintain some order? Or whether Ram Rajya is really a place where every one, no matter whether rich and mighty or poor and destitute are at peace with themselves and ve enough dignity to look anyone and everyone in their eyes with pride. Amish also takes a nice and well discussed look upon the caste system, its origin and how it was malformed to its present rigid system.

The one thing I *LIKED* about the google RTI was their twitter integration. It showed me my latest tweet (10 mins old! ) Thats pretty cool.
Will Google Search replace twitter search?
Look up @shashiTharoor in this new feature:
http://bit.ly/dxeRTm